​Wow, we can’t believe that it is already week 9 of the quarter! It feels like we just began our project. This past week we have been really pushing to finish our report and presentation. It has been great to delve into our data and literature review and really put all the pieces together. Our goal is to finish a preliminary draft of both the presentation and report by Monday so that Jenn can review our results and offer any pieces of constructive feedback. Since we do not have as much experience as Jenn compiling these types of reports, we are interested to see if she notices any interesting findings from the data that we did not originally see. Also, Jenn let us know that David from her office will be coming on Wednesday to watch our presentation and take notes since she has a prior commitment.

For the presentation we have been talking about how we want to convey our findings and importance of the project. One idea we had is to begin by telling the ‘story’ that most people have of Los Altos, but then breaking down these stereotypes through our results and data. We think this would be a compelling way to present our findings because, through our research, we have found that our original impressions of Los Altos were not fully correct. We may also try to include posters and other forms of presenting our results.

For the report we have made significant progress to finish the literature review and deliverables section. Tonight we are having a remote study session to complete the methodology and project purpose components. Then on Saturday we are going to focus on ‘seeing’ what the data is telling us. Evan has produced a variety of graphs thus far, with the intent of being able to compare economic and demographic conditions within Los Altos so that we might better understand the foundations and drivers of the city.

Moving Forward (to the finish line!!)This past week we’ve been working on finalizing our deliverables, as outlined last week in our meeting with Jenn. Moving forward we’ll continue to do so. In the talk with Jenn today, we realized we had a few more economic variables to consider for the data analysis portion, including unemployment rates and major industries of employment. We’ll work to find reliable data for these variables, and include them in our final presentation.

Additionally, we realized that including social components and characteristics of cities in the literature reviews is relevant and important to our project. We’ll analyze existing urban economic reports to investigate when and why social impacts are economically important (e.g. in areas with high tourism rates), and how that might be relevant to Los Altos.